Sigitas Parulskis

SIGITAS PARULSKIS

Sigitas Parulskis is a cult writer, one of the most popu­lar and most read contemporary Lithuanian authors. He has been active in the Lithuanian literature scene for over twenty years. He made his debut in 1990 with his book of poetry titled Iš ilgesio visa tai (It’s All Based on Longing), and wrote poetry, plays, and dramatizations during the first decade of inde­pendence. His work became popular and reached cult status after his first novel about the Soviet Army, titled Trys sekundės dangaus (Three Seconds of Heaven, 2002), and Nuogi drabužiai (Nude Clothes, 2002), a collection of essays. The author was awarded the National Litera­ture Prize in 2004. Parulskis’ writing frequently finds itself ranked highly on lists of the best or most popular books. The collection of essays titled Sraigė su beisbolo lazda (The Snail with the Baseball Bat) was nominated as the book of the year in 2007. Parulskis’ work stands out by its roughness an unflattering tone, its unadorned language, its sharp irony and self-irony, often giving way to coarse cynicism, a strong sense of existentialism, and reflections on the plight of man in today’s postmodern or post-humanistic epoch.

The Fangs of My Convictions is a multi-layered and multi-genre book. With documentary-like detail, this often existential and ironic Parulskis essay describes the recollections of a Soviet, i.e. a twen­tieth-century, man, and additionally includes I am Love, a theatri­cal monologue. The writer himself suggests to the reader that these words come from observation, experience, and imagination. Within them, behind the dense (self-conscious) irony and veil of light sar­casm lies solid life experience and emotion, a variety of manifesta­tions of being, reflections, realities, and recollections. The better part of the texts display Parulskis’ usual clear and evident thinking and writing style, next to which appears a new, and almost cynical fatigue of the narrator, that doesn’t stand-out, but reveals itself slowly – after all, convictions have fangs, but hold no promises.

Keywords: writing that comes from observation, experience, and imagination; life’s existentialism, accompanied by irony and self-irony, sarcasm; a degree of fatigue; a little bit of hope(lessness) about life; many recollections from the twentieth century.